Arkashean Q&A Session -- 127
PAUL: Okay.
CARLA: I remember the very first time I came down here I was definitely...I was full of skepticism.
THERRY: There's a difference between skepticism and the Devil's Advocate method. You can possess skepticism and still use both methods.
CARLA: But I had that... I felt like I needed some kind of proof, you know.
THERRY: Well neither method will give you that proof. Proof is something that comes from within yourself.
CARLA: But you can give some pretty specific proof, you know! [Chuckles]
THERRY: Well, if it's proof, it's because you accepted it as proof. But all I did was meet the needs of the situation based on the question that you asked.
CARLA: It was pretty hard to ignore, though. I mean it was...
THERRY: Well, truth has that way sometimes.
CARLA: So that's not what you're talking about then? 'Cause I was feeling like you have to prove something to me. But that's not what you were talking about...
THERRY: No.
CARLA: ...when you were saying prove it...? Oh!
THERRY: No. We're talking about...I'll give you some examples. We'll play a role. If I'm very quietly saying, "You say the Earth is tilted 20 degrees, it that true?" As opposed to, "What do you mean, the earth is 20 degrees?!! Where the hell did you get that?" See, one is confrontative. See, it doesn't matter which of the two methods, I can disbelieve you in both of them, so neither of them will give you proof. Does that explain the difference?
CARLA: Yeah, 'cause I don't...I don't feel like arguing so to speak...
THERRY: Well that's not true 'cause the Devil's Advocate method is a confrontative method. You may not look at it as arguing but it is.
CARLA: But not in that tone, "But what the duck do you mean?!"
THERRY: I don't know, you should hear yourself to some of those first questions.
CARLA: [Chuckles]
THERRY: You were pretty good at it. [Chuckles]
CARLA: Does that mean I'm getting back to like...were you connecting that with trying to point the finger somewhere else?
THERRY: Yeah.
CARLA: It was something like that you were saying.
THERRY: Yeah.
CARLA: Yeah?
THERRY: It's based...the premise is based on..."I already know the truth, what the hell are you doing?" "Hey man, I've already got my mind made up! Don't come here and confuse me about the facts!"
CARLA: It felt like...to me it felt like it was more a matter of, "Is what you're telling me the truth or not?" Should I...
THERRY: Yeah but neither method will give you that. Because if I say, "This is the answer to the truth." [In soft-spoken voice] Or if I say, "Hey man, this is...this is where it's at!!! [In rough loud voice]
CARLA: Yeah!
THERRY: Neither method is going to give you the truth. You're going to have to find that out yourself.
GUY: When I asked my very first questions ...my very first questions two hours ago you were answering only my question or...?
THERRY: I answered what you needed.
GUY: Okay. Didn't you take the opportunity to ask some other questions that was not asked?
THERRY: No, I dealt with only what you needed.
GUY: I got very confused.
THERRY: If you remember, what I did is, first I answered the question. Then I added additional information.
GUY: The answer to that question was that we were precisely choosing that method of the Devil's Advocate.
THERRY: Why are they choosing?
GUY: Why did they choose it?
THERRY: Yeah, there is no answer to that one.
GUY: Yeah so...
THERRY: It's what's comfortable for them.
GUY: What was the answer to my question then?
THERRY: I don't think your question was "Why did they choose the Devil's Advocate?"
GUY: Ah, no. It was not that.
THERRY: But nonetheless that's what your words were. So 'cause your words implied why did they choose that method, your mind was not there, so therefore I didn't answer what your words were, I answered what was in your mind.
GUY: Hmmm.
THERRY: You got what you needed, not what you asked for.
GUY: I guess my real...if not question, my real worries, is it compatible, you know, what I think is my attitude and what is hers?
THERRY: I don't think it matters.
GUY: Oh, I think it does.
THERRY: I can see you would because it would make a difference in a peaceful life as opposed to confrontative life...
GUY: Yes, yes.
THERRY: But from my point of view it doesn't matter. It brings spice into it.
CARLA: [Chuckles]
GUY: I wasn't asking from my point of view. Excuse me!
THERRY: Yeah, but you'd have to accept that answer from my point of view.
[Laughter]
GUY: Oh shit! I forgot that!
CARLA: Is he wondering whether or not we are compatible?
THERRY: Not if you were compatible. If the systems each of you use is compatible.
GUY: 'Cause you know, my question last night, my remark last night that I made was that we come here two wees in a year and the only opportunity that we have to talk to you, I mean and the whole base, grounded on that idea that this world is, you know, all crap so this tends to mean that their conception of life and what they're doing here is always swimming in crap, see what I mean? And I don't feel like that at all.
THERRY: Yeah but unfortunately you're not them.
CARLA: [Chuckles]
GUY: No, I know but I'm planning to spend some time with them - at least with one of them.
THERRY: Okay bring some toilet paper with you.
[Chuckles]
GUY: Huh? Bring some toiler paper with me? Yeah!
THERRY: [Chuckles]
CARLA: [Chuckles]
GUY: Okay.
CORA: Can I clarify something 'cause I'm late here in this conversation? Was there something said here that said life is crap and we're swimming in it?
THERRY: The outlook, the outlook.
CORA: It was just the opinion of one person not Arkashea's stance...?
THERRY: Correct.
CORA:...that things are crappy except for us here?
THERRY: Correct, correct.
GUY: Oh, no, no, no, not at all!
CORA: Okay, I didn't know, that's why I jumped in. I didn't know if that had been said on one side or the other.
GUY: No because all their questions yesterday were how we came here with all this idea of coming down here...how come...
THERRY: Basically because they used the Devil's Advocate method he has made the assumption that they're looking at life like everything's crap.
CORA: They thought that was what you were communicating because they were...?
GUY: No.
THERRY: No, no. They were using the Devil's Advocate method of asking questions.
CORA: And so they...
THERRY: He thought they viewed the world as crap because of it. It had nothing to do with the responses that I gave.
ALEX: But they do!
THERRY: Yeah.
ALEX: Because the overwhelming attitude if you put the four of us in one room is the girls are like, "Awww! This world it's just...I can't stand it anymore! It's horrible!"
THERRY: Yeah but it's based on the refusal to accept the responsibility of one's own choices. If you refuse...if you relieve yourself of the responsibility of your own choices, then the only thing that's left is that it's forces beyond your control.
GUY: Is it...
THERRY: And under such a condition, you're right, the world is crap!
CORA: I'm curious about something. I don't know if it's cool for me to jump in here...Uhm the other night I was talking to a friend of mine and uhhh we were talking about each of our own unhappinesses and I said, "Hey! I've gotta take responsibility. I've gotta, you know, say look, "I'm pulling this shit, so I'm pulling this pain." She said to me, she said "You sound like a parent then, you're whipping yourself." She said, "You know, like...like why are you being hard on yourself? Why don't you say, why don't you go through the pain and say, "Yeah, some people did shit on me and it really hurt." " She said, "Instead Cora, what you're always doing is making yourself say, "I've got to get my own emotions in order, I've got to get my own shit together." She said, "It sounds to me that you're a real tough parent on yourself and you're not allowing yourself your feelings." And when she said that, I thought, "Well, you know, I used to think maybe that's what I should do," but I said to her, "There has to come a point when you stop crying about what happened and you have to say, "Okay, you know, now what do I do?" Do you think that it's...it's not allowing yourself that...do you think that you won't be allowing yourself to grow as well as you could, if you don't allow yourself to really feel the pain? Do you think you're being a really cruel parent or a harsh parent on yourself, if you say, "Well, okay, keep yourself together and...Do you know what I'm saying?
THERRY: Do you think it's possible for a person to be ambivalent to have to feel or think more than one way concerning something at the same time?
CORA: I think a person can be ambivalent about something so maybe look at it from different sides of view.
THERRY: And do you think it's possible for a person to express that ambivalence all in one sentence?
CORA: Yeah I think it's possible.
THERRY: I don't. I think that if you are expressing the responsibility side of it, that in and of itself does not imply that you also believe in the other and it doesn't negate that you believe in the other. So perhaps when you express the responsibility side she took the implication that you didn't accept or believe in the other side of it.
CORA: So are you saying that it would be...
THERRY: I'm saying people are going to think what they want to think regardless of what you say.
CORA: But...but my question is, is there one that would be more useful in letting go of pain than the other, if one approach was to allow yourself to feel the pain of what had been done to you as opposed to taking responsibility and getting ahead? Is one more a judgmental parent that doesn't allow growth or...
THERRY: I don't think there's a clear cut answer to that, simply because every behavior, it doesn't matter if you receive the behavior or if you give the behavior, part of that behavior carries with it, a grieving process. That grieving process cannot be denied, it must be fulfilled.
CORA: But, but, doesn't it become habitual?
THERRY: Then it is no longer a grieving process, it's a game.
CORA: How do you judge when it's become a game?
THERRY: Each individual has to decide that for themselves.
CORA: So it could be a person is not allowing themselves to grieve and they're stopping themselves from growing as much as they could because they're being a harsh parent? That's a possibility?
THERRY: That's a possibility.
CORA: So there's a lot of different permutations to this.
THERRY: There's a lot of permutations. But the importance is, you shouldn't make a judgment based on one sentence simply because it is possible to believe in both sides of the camp. Just because a person says, I must be responsible, that doesn't mean that they can't also think and believe that sometimes things happen and I just got to grieve and then move on.
CORA: So the important point is, how do you decide when to move on?
THERRY: When you've had enough..
CORA: Well, that could be after five minutes or after fifty years. So it's just a matter of deciding you've had enough?
THERRY: I mean how long can you sit and blame somebody else? I mean that wears thin too. So what is the difference in spending twenty years of your life blaming somebody else or spending twenty years of your life saying, "I've got to be responsible." Obviously it takes a blend of both.
CORA: So she in her response to me was a little too black and white?
THERRY: No, she made an assumption.
CORA: She assumed that I was doing that all the time?
THERRY: Right, she didn't assume that you could perhaps also believe in the other.
CORA: I wanted to ask some things before about what Heather was saying. I didn't want to interrupt her at the time. Uhm two things about conversion. The first thing, you said something that I don't know if I understood. You said something about ...there's a difference...one thing you can do is generalize something and make it bigger and bigger and you seemed to put a negative kinda connotation on that. You said that was more conversion instead of limiting yourself to what it means and I wanted you to like elucidate on that a little bit.
THERRY: Okay, every...the thing that makes language work is the limitations of each label.
CORA: Uh-hmmm.
THERRY: Now language works best when each label has one and only one meaning. When you take your language and you start giving it all kinds of contradictory meanings, then language breaks down.
CORA: So you're saying that's what happens when you're generalizing it? You're kinda making it palatable so you can ...But that was part of my second question, which was, a lot of people convert so that they can take it in. Well isn't that a screen to protect themselves a little bit and can't they still grow? Couldn't it be a useful screen so...
THERRY: That wasn't never part of the question. The question was not, "Can you still learn from corruption?. Obviously, it depends on the individual. The question is, why be corrupt if you expect perfection! If you expect perfect answers and perfect sense, perfect this, in your reality, how do you expect to get that if you are the prime corrupter because of the way you corrupt your language.
CORA: Okay, I accept that. I'm, I'm diverging off that and asking not...okay, perhaps in that context we were talking about...
THERRY: See the question never has been if it is possible to learn out of corruption. That was never the question.
CORA: Right, so I'm taking an aside here. I'm not asking can we learn from corruption. I'm asking would a person corrupt something to protect themselves, thus the corruption does serve a useful purpose for that time.
THERRY: Oh hell there's a whole lot of reasons why people should corrupt things.
CORA: But that's one...that's one that's possible?
THERRY: The only thing that's germane is the admittance that corruption is usually a part of any given communication.
CORA: And almost every person will be corrupt because everybody's learnt language in different ways and makes it palatable to themselves in different ways.
THERRY: That's what we said.
CORA: Right.
THERRY: We said that already.
CORA: Right.
THERRY: Even I myself have a 5% corruption rate.
CORA: So the best you can do is try to stick as close to the limitations and boundaries as you can?
THERRY: Yeah.
CORA: And that's like the Tower of Babel and people not understanding each other and not struggling?
THERRY: Yes, yeah.
CORA: There was only one other thing when you were talking to Heather that I wondered about, when you kept saying things about not giving a shit about committing suicide, it was just changing clothes and stuff?
THERRY: Yeah. That was dealing with her, not only hers but anyone who was present, the Devil's Advocate as though they give me ultimatums. What the hell do I give a damn!
CORA: So that was said in a certain context?
THERRY: Right.
CORA: But if placed in a different context , there is a part of you who's a very loving teacher...?
THERRY: For every body that asks me a question, there's a certain ultimatum involved with it. As though, if you don't give me a specific something, then I won't believe you. What the duck if I care if you believe me or not!!! No sweat off my ass!
CORA: So you have to say, I don't give a shit because it was posed as a threat?
THERRY: It was posed not as a threat because there are no threats; it was posed as an ultimatum. It's like the little boy, who's ... "If you don't give me this, I'm going to hold my breath! I'm going to get mad!!!" What do I care?
CORA: In a kinda way you do care about...
THERRY: No, I don't!
CORA: ...about the individuals you deal with...?
THERRY: No, I don't. If she were to take a gun or jump off a building, I couldn't care less. It's her life. The reason why I don't care is because I know that that would not be the end. She would then go into the suicide loop, she would then learn. And based on the rest of the world, we'd be better off she just got it over with, simply because we then wouldn't have to deal with the crap.
CORA: And would that include people who you've woven...
THERRY: I think it would be sad, very sad...
CORA: Yeah, but people...
THERRY: And I don't think that's the way it should go, but that's beside the point.
CORA: Even people you've woven years long relationships with or decades long relationships with...? I mean you do care, there's love and...
THERRY: You must learn to see the world from their eyes, not from your own. People that you've woven relationships with, the act of caring basically is nothing more than selfishness for what they can do for you. It's based on the self. And that's why the grieving process is there. It's difficult to determine if you're grieving for their loss or if grieving for your loss. When I'm in the fabric position, there is no love, so therefore there is no...
CORA: So when you're in your serial position ...
THERRY: When I'm in my serial position I'm just as shocked as everybody else.
CORA: Oh okay.
THERRY: But when I get into...when I become a mouthpiece for whatever, then I don't get into the serial condition and under that condition, "Hey, here's a knife, go in a corner somewhere and have fun! Don't bother me." Take responsibility for our own life.
CORA: Okay, I think I understand
THERRY: But my serial position, I'd probably take the knife away from her, put her in a straight jacket and put her in a hospital someplace, tie her in chains so that she can't do it.
CORA: I understand, I mean the Universe in one way really cares but in another way, can't allow that as a lever...
THERRY: The Universe doesn't care! The Universe is made up of cause and effect laws. And once it gave Free Will, from that point on, it doesn't care. It doesn't care what route you take for your journey because it knows in the end, you must return.
CORA: And yet you say that the Universe is strictly law and cause and effect and yet when people deal with the Universe, oftentimes they feel a strong feeling of love or...
THERRY: Because love is the basic law of the Universe.
CORA: I can accept ...I can accept law.
THERRY: If you want any more proof in terms of how it's just law, look at the animal kingdom, "Kill, be killed; Eat and be eaten."
CORA: But there's no love.
THERRY: You try to tell that to a cub that's snuggling up to its mother.
CORA: So if somebody's really converting like hell, you can say, "Okay, that's something they're using to protect themselves, right now and maybe they'll...."
THERRY: You can say anything but that won't make it valid, just because you said it.
CORA: Well that could be true though based on what you just told me...
THERRY: Does that change what I've said?
CORA: No. Are people who are trained to be psychologists and active listeners...are they almost trained to convert? Is that...I mean, in the schooling of today?
THERRY: Well I don't know that I could say either yes or no specifically for that question. I think it'd be more accurate to say they are trained to try to get the individual that they are counseling to see the light from an established point of view. Obviously, the process of doing that would require conversions, but I don't think that they're being trained to convert, so much as they're being trained to use conversion as one tool. Does that make sense to you?
CORA: Yeah.
THERRY: This is good coffee.
CORA: Yeah.
PAUL: Ashes!
CARLA: [Chuckles]
CORA: What?
ALEX: Ashes.
THERRY: It's as bad as ashes! Their coffee is a combination of ashes, burnt wood, whatever.
CORA: Oh.
THERRY: They have a combination of espresso and decaf or something like that. It's way too strong for me. Every time I drink that coffee, to me it tastes like a combination of ashes and chicory.
GUY: Do you want ashes and chicory?
CORA: No thanks, I'll be up all night.
GUY: Okay.
CARLA: Uhm, can I go back to the...
GUY: No, no, you...